Random Salad finds success on Windows through experimentation and monetization

Migration to the Universal Windows Platform and monetization with Promote Your App helped Random Salad Games make free games profitable.

Fun should come at no cost to the user.

Providing users a fun experience for free may seem like a strange way to make money. Yet for Random Salad Games, a profit-making casual-game studio whose titles include Simple Solitaire and Hearts Deluxe, downloads of their free games have tripled since the launch of Windows 10, and performance and revenue have doubled for their games that leverage new Windows advertising services.

So how does a studio making free games become profitable?

For Random Salad, the answer lay in migration to the Universal Windows Platform and a monetization strategy linked directly to their gameplay experience.

Thanks to the Universal Windows Platform, the ads served in our games are high-quality, targeted ads.

Platform as partner with Windows

Poznanski initially became interested in the developer-friendly Windows Phone 7 environment in 2010, when he was a college intern at Microsoft working with the Windows Phone team. After his internship, college friend Sam Kaufmann joined him in creating mobile games. They graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 with computer science degrees and a dream of forging full-time careers in making fun, free games.

They scored early success on Windows Phone 7 with their takes on classic games (Simple Solitaire and Simple Word Search), and that led to more hits such as Crazy Casino and Fish Fortress. Jake and Sam soon found that their games dominated the charts for Windows Mobile products, with multiple rankings in the top 100 games list on the Zune Marketplace.

Random Salad Games chose to develop on Windows because it’s very easy, Sam said, pointing out that if you make one small change to your game, you can deploy it to PC and other devices and see that change right away.

“On Windows, we enjoyed fast-loading emulators and an easy-to-use development environment with Visual Studio. And thanks to Xamarin, the porting process to [other platforms] is a breeze. We can make a single solution and, with a single click, we can switch between deploying our app to a Windows device and an Android device."

The team said that the UWP gives developers the best integration with Microsoft Store Services SDKs, especially the ad SDK.

“Thanks to the Universal Windows Platform, the ads served in our games are high-quality, targeted ads that pay well and look professional, making us more money and making users feel like they can trust our games,” Jake said.